[Foundation-l] Stream of consciousness story about license migration

Wed Apr 9 01:22:06 UTC 2008

I was trying to sleep. The worst thing which may happen during this
process is to think about something interesting. A couple of hours ago
I was talking with Tazeh again. We really enjoy in talking to each
other about Serbia and Iran and what do we know about each other's
country. From talk to talk I am more and more fascinating with Iran.
Their society stays very well despite all predispositions. And I am
really interested in how their ordinary life looks like. I've got an
idea! I'll suggest to Tazeh an action: I will go through Belgrade once
per week and make photographs of it, while he will do the same in
Zanjan. Then, we put our photos at Commons, we will be able to see the
ordinary life in each city and to give to others the same possibility.
I should put some license there. CC-BY is good enough. Oh, no! My rule
is that whenever I want to give something under CC-BY, I should put it
under CC-BY-SA. Yes, even I don't have any relation to my photos and I
would be content with PD, too, I should copyleft them. Copyleft... No,
it is not reasonable to put photos under GFDL. It makes photos
useless. Photos under GFDL? Oh, Erik was talking about that problem.
There are a lot of images under GFDL and this is a problem. Some
people gave their photos under GFDL. Yes, people are usually giving
their work under GFDL, it is a Wikipedia license. ... ... ... Ahhhh! A
lot of non-contributors to Wikipedia gave their work under GFDL to
contributors of Wikipedia! It is a really mess! Isn't it? Time to wake
up!

* * *

I am sure that someone thought about that, but I would like to know
how it was addressed? If it is a top secret, say so and it would be
enough.

I realized that whenever I asked for permissions (for texts), I didn't
ask for "1.2" nor for "any later". I was asking for "giving the work
under GFDL, which means that work may be used for any purpose,
including commercial, non-commercial, academic etc. while it stays
under the same license". I don't think that any of permissions which
I've got for Wikipedia are questionable in that sense because I
described any copyleft license and the first part "under GFDL" is
generally irrelevant. However, we have tons of such permissions...
AFAIK, GFDL 1.3 will say something in the sense that products of
wiki-like work may switch to CC-BY-SA. If we got a complete article
(whatever the size is) from some place under GFDL, that work was not
usually made in a wiki process. Such work was given under the
particular conditions, which me-amateur-lawyer interprets as "under
GFDL, maybe under some later version, but no way under some other
license".